oldoligarch's Full Review: Holmes Products HFH6250-U Infra-Red Electric Utili...
Why I Need a Safe Heater:
I am the father of a very active two-year-old girl, and my family has just moved into a new house. Some of the rooms upstairs on one side of the house (Mom's office, baby's room) tend to be cold. My daughter spends a lot of time in these two rooms, often playing around. I wanted a heater that I could use without fear during the day, when she is liable to touch it or bump into it; and at night, when we keep the door closed and I cannot see what is going on in her room. While our girl sleeps in a crib and cannot get out (yet!), I was concerned about the stray toy, piece of paper, stuffed animal, etc., coming in contact with the heater without someone seeing it.
My two rooms are about 15' x 12' each, so they would not need a very powerful heat source to supplement our unbalanced forced-air system that leaves these rooms cold.
The bottom line: Several features about this heater led me to return it after only one day in favor of a Bionaire BH3950, which I had initially bought to heat the basement without any child-related use in mind.
Why I Bought the Holmes Model:
I saw the Holmes HFH6250-U in my local hardware store. The HFH6250-U is part of Holmes' Family Safe line of products. See: www.holmesproducts.com/FamilySafe.aspx. The packaging touted the heater's many safety features. They are:
Indeed, if memory serves, it called itself "one of the safest heaters you can buy!" In particular, I liked the (supposedly) safe-to-touch grille and the sensor beam on the front of the heater, which shuts off the heater when a stray object, dog, or little person obstructs the front of the heater within an inch or so of the grille.
The heater is curved in a slight C-shape. The reason for this shape is so that the safety beam can pass over the front surface of the heater. The beam travels from the upper left corner of the heater, over its face, to the lower right. If something interrupts the beam so that the sensor in the lower right corner does not pick it up, the heater immediately shuts off. This works much like the beam and sensor eye systems that many modern garage door openers use to make sure nothing is in the door's path before closing it.
The heater is powered by a ceramic element located in the middle of the C-shape. It sits in a tube-shaped hollow portion about 5 inches in diameter. Behind the heating element is a small plastic fan, similar to the big 120mm fans you see inside computer cases. The rest of the heater is just support structure. In other words, the heat comes out the middle, through the 5-inch diameter opening that spans from front to back, and nowhere else. You might think, by looking at it, that the whole front is radiant, but it isn't.
On the backside, there are fin-shaped inlets for the air. They are spaced close to prevent things from being stuck into the fan.
My Concerns about the Grille
The open grille on the front of the heater was a concern to me. I remember the old oil-filled heaters and kerosene heaters my grandmother had, and how quickly a stray touch would burn the skin on your finger or leg. No matter how well-behaved our daughter is, I obviously didn't want something like that anywhere near her.
The good news: this heater gets nowhere near as hot as the old-fashioned ones.
The bad news: I think it would burn my daughter if she ran up to it and touched the grille for just a second, or worse if she knocked it over and it fell on her even briefly.
Testing It Out
Set-up took less than two minutes. This model arrives ready to unpack, plug-in, and go. So I did.
If you're wondering whether this unit has a fan, or if it just uses convection, you'll find out as soon as you turn it on! Some people don't mind fan noise. It drives me crazy. I've even ditched the fans in my desktop computer in favor of a fanless case.
This unit has a cheap, plastic fan, and it sounds like it. I wondered, in fact, whether the bearings had gotten damaged during shipping, and the fan was out of alignment because it warbled and whirred so much. I've played around with a lot of computer fans in my day, and this was either a very low quality fan or damaged. Slightly better engineering and spending $3 more on a good fan would have made a huge difference here.
But I didn't have to listen to that racket, and my wife didn't mind. So next, I checked out the grille.
I let the heater run for about 10 minutes to get up to normal operating temperature. The ceramic element gets hot quickly, and the great thing about a fan-driven heater is that it disperses warm air immediately throughout a small room. Within minutes, we felt toasty and warm in my wife's normally cool office. In this regard, the product worked very well.
The drawback of the HFH6250's heating element and fan placement, however, is that all the heat passes through a 5-inch circular section of the grille halfway up it -- just about shoulder height on a toddler. If she's going to reach out her hand and touch it, or run and bang into it, she will make contact at the hottest part of the machine.
I put my hand in front of the grille. Obviously, with a 1500 watt element pumping out heat, I expected it to be hot, and it was, like holding your hand before the hairdryer. It's the contact with metal, however, that can sear instantly, and this was my chief concern. So I placed my hand on the enamel-coated safety grille. (The safety beam is easy to circumvent if you just take an oblique angle of approach.) I could only keep my hand there for 2 or 3 seconds before it felt scaldingly hot.
If it can make my hand that uncomfortable in just 2 seconds, I know it's hot enough to burn my daughter's more delicate skin in a mere moment. Even when I put my hand on the grille such that I tripped the shut-off beam, the grille remained plenty hot there. I was convinced there was too much burn potential to leave this device around my daughter even if I was watching nearby. A second or two of contact before a burn happens is not family-safe in my book. And while the beam often shuts off the heater (more below), this is not enough time for the center of the grille to cool down.
Outside of the hot zone of the grille, results were far better. I could leave my hand there for at least 10 seconds before wanting to remove it. This would be time enough for our daughter to feel the heat, and yank her hand away. I doubt she would get burned from touching over 70% of the grille surface. But the middle is enough, so back to the store it went.
In the meantime, I did have time to notice that the beam, while an interesting concept, is quite fallible. My wife's office is covered in papers (surprise, surprise) and quite by accident, a heavy manila paper folder slid off a desk, skirting the beam, and came to rest on the front lower left corner of the heater, over the grille. It didn't shut off. The beam doesn't cover the whole front, just a diagonal path over the front maybe two inches wide, and something quickly moving and really thin like paper had no trouble getting through the beam without tripping it. I wouldn't trust this mechanism around dogs, for instance, although it works great if something larger and more inert (like a pillow or stuffed animal) gets thrown in front of the heater. Nice concept, but not well-designed enough to give me peace of mind that a stray page of coloring book wouldn't float down and ignite when I was out of the room for a half-hour, even if the grille were cooler to the touch.
There were also enough angles of approach where I could touch the grille without tripping the beam that I do not doubt curious hands, dog noses, etc. couldn't find their way to the grille. If Holmes wanted to get serious about implementing this admittedly good idea, why not put a ROW of such sensors along the front of the heater, pointing top-to-bottom. About six of them would make a much more fool-proof shutoff mechanism. I would gladly pay $10 - $20 more for the extra beams if this concept worked (and the grille wasn't so hot).
One thing I didn't test is what happens if something obstructs the air intake in the back, where there is no sensor. I presume the overheat protection kicks in here and shuts the heating element down.
The tipover shutoff feature works great. It shuts off whenever knocked over. Even a good whack, enough to make the heater wobble but not fall over, pauses the heater for a moment until it gets stable again.
1) I was initially concerned that the Bionaire wouldn't have enough heating power without a fan. Yet after hearing the fan on the Holmes, I was glad at least one heater I bought was fanless. Turns out, the Bionaire does just fine in these 15' x 12' rooms. The feeling of warmth wasn't instant like it was with the Holmes. The fanless Bionaire relies on convection (=hot air rises, thus circulating itself through the heater), and thus it takes some time to get going, but once it gets going, it easily makes the room just as warm.
2) The sides of the Bionaire were cooler than the Holmes! I could set my hand on it for about 15-20 seconds without discomfort. Part of the reason for the temperature difference, of course, is that the heat comes out the top of the Bionaire, which she is less likely to touch, and the sides draw in air. But even on the top of the Bionaire, the temperature was lower than the front of the Holmes. Even though the sides of the Bionaire are also made of enamel-coated metal, I am less concerned about my daughter accidentally touching the side of the Bionaire because the metal is cooler. The Bionaire achieves cooler chassis temperatures by virtue of two factors, as far as I can tell: (a) the hottest part (the top) is made from plastic instead of enamel-coated metal, (b) the heat is dispersed over a larger surface area of the heater, eliminating the hotspot problem of the Holmes.
The only safety features on the Bionaire are overheat shutoff and tipover shut off, yet it proved cooler and safer than the "FamilySafe" heater with all its safety technology.
I ended up keeping the Bionaire upstairs, and it has worked well for me there. I will review it later.
But for now, this dad says: the bells and whistles on the HFH6250 are interesting safety ideas, but this unit is not a proof-of-concept. There's still potential for a toddler mishap with this heater because of the impotent beam placement and bizarrely concentrated heat path through the middle of the front grille. Better design might make this heater truly family safe, but as it stands, I feel it is not safe.
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